Geoffrey Lean is Britain's longest-serving environmental correspondent, having pioneered reporting on the subject almost 40 years ago.

Atlas's reputation melts faster than Greenland ice

Map of Greenland from the 13th edition of The Times Atlas of the World (left) and a mosaic of MODIS satellite images of the same area acquired on the 14th and 15th August 2011

Global warming does funny things to people and institutions – just look at what happened to the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The latest august institution to get heated-up egg on its face is the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, supposedly the ultimate reference book for those, like me, who love maps. “Easily the best atlas there is”, in Bill Bryson’s judgment, printed prominently on the front cover: “By far and away the greatest book on earth” opines explorer Ranulph Fiennes on its protective box.

The latest edition, just out, dutifully portrays some of the physical changes to the face of the planet being brought about by environmental destruction. The shrinkage of the Aral and Black Seas is depicted as are the drying up of the Colorado river (which because of dams and abstractions upstream now fails to reach the ocean) and the disappearance of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsular through global warming. But it has become massively unstuck with a claim that the Greenland ice-cap has shrunk by 15 per cent in little over a decade, and a map showing large areas of the giant island that had apparently turned green. Its publicity material called this “concrete evidence of how climate change is altering the face of the planet forever – and doing so at an alarming and accelerating rate.”

Uh-huh. The claim and map were swiftly denounced by the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University and the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder Colorado. These are probably the world’s two top authorities on Arctic ice – just about as far removed as the somewhat marginal scientists sometimes trotted out by sceptics to dispute findings on climate change as it is possible to be. Seven scientists from the Cambridge Institute wrote to say that the claim was “both incorrect and misleading” while a top scientist from the Boulder centre called the map “inappropriate.” The scientists reckon that the real shrinkage is nearer one per cent.

The publishers, Harper Collins, initially reacted in the same bombastic, self-defeating way as had Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC when presented with the fact that its report had grossly exaggerated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting. “We are the best there is” insisted a spokeswoman for the Atlas. “We are confident of the data we have used and of the cartography. Our data shows that (the ice) has reduced by 15 per cent. That’s categorical.” But by the afternoon the firm apologised for the claim, while continuing – to the puzzlement of scientists – to insist that the map was accurate.

Interestingly, just as in the case of the Himalayan glaciers, the error was spotted and publicized, not by climate sceptics, but by scientists who themselves are convinced that global warming is taking place. And indeed the Arctic is melting. Sea ice this year plunged to about the same as its lowest ever extent, in 2007. Greenland’s biggest glacier, Sermeq Kujalleq – as I discovered when I visited the area that year – was retreating by ten miles a year, five times as fast as a decade before. Outside the nearby town of Ilulissat, I came across a huge settlement of unemployed huskies, tethered next to makeshift kennels, with nothing to do because the sea had failed to freeze giving them and their sleds nowhere to go. Further south, at Qassiarsuk broccoli was being harvested for the first time in Greenland, as the villagers complained they could no longer drive their cars across their fjord in winter to see friends on the opposite shore for lack on winter ice.

All the same, after its gross error, the reputation of the self-styled “world’s most prestigious and authoritative atlas” is now melting away even faster.